Full text of what Atiku said about Buhari govt, killings in Nigeria, restructuring
Published on February 25, 2018 By Wale Odunsi
Former
Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has again asked the President Muhammadu
Buhari administration to work harder to improve the lives of Nigerians.
Atiku, in his keynote speech delivered at the Silverbird Man Of The Year 2017, also spoke on killings across the country.
He lamented the situation stated that security of lives and property must be more guaranteed.
On
restructuring, he said if he becomes the nation’s leader, “no state
receive less money from the federation account than it currently does.”
Full text of his speech below…
“Ladies
and gentlemen, I am honoured to be given this privilege to give the
keynote speech at the Silverbird Man of the Year 2017 ceremony.
I
know the organizers have collated the votes and this will lead to the
emergence of the official Silverbird man of the year. However, my man of
the year are also the gallant men and women of the Nigerian Armed
Forces who paid the supreme price to protect us from terrorists and
those who desire to divide us.
Our nation is going through a lot
of challenges. There are challenges to our unity, economic challenges
and most worrisome of all are the security challenges we are currently
facing.
These challenges are actually symptoms. They are not the
ailment. And as any doctor will tell you, you cannot get genuine
long-lasting relief if you treat symptoms. You have to target and treat
the root cause of the disease.
What is happening in Nigeria is
that as a nation, we are caught up in a modern-day Malthusian Trap. For
years, our population has been growing faster than our Gross Domestic
Product, bringing us to a point where we have an ever-increasing
population competing for resources that are not keeping pace with
population growth.
It may sound simplistic, but if Nigeria
can assemble a leadership focused on getting us out of this Malthusian
Trap by gradually reversing the trend where population growth exceeds
GDP growth, many of these challenges we are currently facing will slowly
but surely fade away.
Last year, we celebrated the fact that we exited our first recession in 25 years. To me, that celebration was premature.
After
contracting for five consecutive quarters, Nigeria came out of
recession in the second quarter of 2017 with a GDP growth rate of 0.55%.
In the third quarter, we fared better with 1.40%.
While this
looks somewhat like we exited the recession, the reality is that when
you factor in our population growth rate of 2.3%, which is one of the
highest in the world, have we really exited a recession? Technically,
yes, but in reality, it is doubtful.
This month of February 2018,
according to the World Poverty Clock, Nigeria has just overtaken India
as the world’s capital of extreme poverty. There are more extremely poor
people in Nigeria than there are in India, a country that has six times
Nigeria’s population.
When people do not have jobs and the means
to start a business are beyond their reach, they are incrementally much
more likely to engage in criminal behaviours like terrorism,
kidnapping, militancy and armed robbery.
According to the African
Development Bank, in 2017, 18 African countries grew their Gross
Domestic Product above 5%. Nigeria, which was number one in 2014, was
not amongst these nations. We must figure out what has happened in the
intervening years between 2014 and 2018 and fix what went wrong.
What
happened to brilliant initiatives like the YouWIN programme which gave
Nigerian youths the training and funding to start their own businesses?
Nigeria
has a median age of 18.3 years. Our population is young. So when we
have successful and laudable initiatives like YouWIN, which according to
the World Bank, was two and a half times more effective than Mexico’s
similar youth job initiative and ten times more effective than Turkey’s
own version, we must continue them even when there has been a change in
administration.
We talk of fighting corruption, but let us move beyond sentiments and media trials and look at the facts.
We
must try to identify why, though we have been ostensibly fighting
corruption for the past few years, Transparency International, the
official global anti-corruption monitoring agency, has not increased our
Corruption Perception Index rating. The last time we made progress was
in 2014.
Not to belabour the point, but we have to kill the snake
of corruption that swallows the commonwealth that should lift our
people up from poverty. Whether that snake is in a JAMB Office or any
other government office, we must kill it or it will kill us.
Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
We
have been in denial about restructuring, but with a failing economy,
worsening insecurity, and negative indices in almost all spheres of the
human development index, we can no longer run from the obvious.
Nigeria
needs to be restructured. We must embrace restructuring as something
that must be done to fix Nigeria’s broken systems and not just a
campaign gimmick that we fish out of our magic hats and deny after we
have gotten what we want.
Let me say this: The Restructuring that
I, Atiku Abubakar, envisions, will see no state receive less money from
the federation account than it currently does. I hope that will ease
the anxieties of some who oppose restructuring. Restructuring will not
cheat you. It will free you.
When I was in government, we reduced
recurrent expenditure by introducing the monetization Policy and by
privatizing many government enterprises, especially those that were
consuming resources without generating revenue. Those policies have been
bastardized today and we have seen a ballooning of our recurrent
expenditure and shrinkage of our capital expenditure. We must return to
the basics.
We cannot spend 70% of our budget on recurrent
expenditure at a time Nigeria has more unemployed or underemployed
people than the entire population of the Republic of Cameroon.
Many
of you in the audience and those of you watching from home may be
surprised to know that when I was a teenager, the Saudi Royal Family
came to Nigeria for medical tourism and precisely to the University
College Hospital, Ibadan.
Can you imagine how I feel that now
that I am an adult, Nigerians, and especially our leaders, are Africa’s
Number One medical tourists.
We have to enact laws to prevent
leaders from diverting public funds from the public health sector to the
treatment of the elite in the best hospitals abroad. If you can afford
it from your own private resources, then pay for it. But do not make the
tax payer pay for it.
We are in critical times, and as I
conclude, I want to urge a paradigm shift in Nigeria. Our elite are
treated in Europe. Big Brother Naija is being broadcast from South
Africa and Nike is unveiling our FIFA World Cup Jersey in London. Is
this the extent to which we have outsourced Nigeria? As far as I am
concerned, if it concerns Nigeria, it must be done in Nigeria, not
abroad. Not abroad.
Finally, let me say to Borno, Benue, Taraba,
Adamawa, Plateau, Kaduna and now Zamfara, I feel your pains on the
recent deaths you have suffered and the time has come for all Nigerians
to say together, no more! These senseless killings must end!
As a wise-man once said, that no one’s religious, economic or social interests is worth the shedding of blood.
We
must accept that the difference between Nigerians is not North and
South, Christian and Muslim or PDP and APC. The difference is between
good and bad people and we must demonstrate that the good are much more
than the bad.
Let me once again thank the organizers of the
Silverbird Man of the Year Award for inviting me to give this keynote
speech. Distinguished Senator Ben Bruce, please carry on with your
common sense messages.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen and may God bless Nigeria!”